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tommeagher / pycar14

The Python mini boot camp at NICAR 2014 in Baltimore.
https://github.com/ireapps/pycar
MIT License
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Next year #19

Closed tommeagher closed 9 years ago

tommeagher commented 10 years ago

Hey everybody, One last thought. While NICAR is still relatively fresh in our minds, what do you think we should do differently next year?

Are there any other projects, or a different schedule we should look at? Do you want to refactor any of your code now, rather than waiting until we're in the hotel bar in Atlanta at the end of next February?

What do you think?

kevinschaul commented 10 years ago

Our section had encoding troubles with the BLS website, which was way over the heads of our class (and still a bit over mine, too). Of course, a significant portion of our class was not from the U.S., and so would need to learn how to deal with non-ASCII characters in the real world. More thought is required on how (or whether) to handle this.

I vote for a non-Wakari solution, if possible. It's unfortunate that the training session machines are Windows given that so much of the development and support is on Unix-y systems. I'd love to see these workshops at least use Ubuntu in a virtual box.

tommeagher commented 10 years ago

Kevin, Encoding is the bane of my existence, so you raise a great question: how/should we handle it next year? I don't have any great solutions but would love to hear what everyone else thinks. Maybe this just becomes an open ticket for the next iteration.

As for the teaching platform, I'm totally fine with ditching Wakari. We actually stopped using it about 15 minutes in because there were 6 people who couldn't get in, and it was too complicated to help two sets of people separately. I do think it's good to let people know about it, so they have a sandbox to practice in at home if they can't get their own computer set up.

That said, using Anaconda/iPython with Notepad++ and PowerShell worked fine. Next year, we could ask to be in a room with Macs. If not, we're just going to have to be hardasses about it: if you don't have the basic tools installed on your own machine and know how to use them, you must use the NICAR machines. We just don't have the time to spend helping two or three lost souls get started while we lose the rest of the room's attention.

tommeagher commented 9 years ago

Closed by forking the repo over to ireapps/pycar#1